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McKenzie: We'll bounce back

Ewen McKenzie is adamant Australia can turn things around in Wellington next weekend after their crushing 29-47 loss to the All Blacks in Sydney on Saturday night.

The Wallabies got to within three points of the world champions early in the second half on the back of Christian Lealiifano's fifth penalty goal before conceding 22 unanswered points en route to a comprehensive six-tries-to-two defeat.

"I've been around the rugby scene a long time and a lot of you blokes should know if you look at results you'll see 70-point turnarounds in seven days, so you've just got to make sure you focus on the right things," McKenzie said at the post-match press conference.

"We'll tidy up our errors, we'll definitely focus on that bit, but there are other ways (we can improve). Some of the things we did, with a little bit more precision they'll work quite well.

"We're not going to sit there and get bogged down and spin our wheels, we'll concentrate on the positives."

Pressed on what went wrong in his maiden Test as a head coach, McKenzie lamented his players' inability to keep possession and build pressure.

"We were level pegging there for some time in the game but you've got to respect possession," he said.

"We had possession there at times where we did some good things, we made a bunch of line breaks, but we didn't treasure the ball enough and they were very good on counter-attack.

"We didn't control the ball and they were able to play and do some of the things they're good at, and you pay a price for that.

"But in amongst it there are some bits and pieces that we liked, there's some stuff there that we can certainly improve, there's no question about that."

Asked if he's likely to make widespread changes for Wellington, McKenzie replied: "You go back to the drawing board, I'm not happy with the scoreline... there's stuff there that's just little processes that need to be tidied up, so that can be fixed.

"We'll have a good look (at selections), we'd have a look any way, it wouldn't matter if we'd won or lost, I'd still be looking at the contribution of everyone."

Despite recent earthquakes in Wellington, McKenzie expects the game to go ahead as planned on Saturday night.

"We haven't talked about it at all," he said of the earthquakes.

"We'll obviously rely on the local authorities to guide us there but we're getting no information that we're not going to be playing there at the Cake Tin and having a crack.

"We'll just go there and prepare as we've already planned to do. We'll be going to Melbourne, preparing down there and travelling across on Wednesday."

Meanwhile, skipper James Horwill welcomed the challenge of having to win two games in New Zealand to reclaim the Bledisloe Cup for the first time in 11 years and admits the new scrum interpretations were a lottery on Saturday night.

"I think it was a bit of a feeling out process for everyone, including the referee," Horwill said.

"They're obviously going to be pretty strict on the feed and they've made that pretty clear so we will learn from that."